So news is out that Akanishi Jin, who by the look of things spent the better part of his adult life taking his, uh, WildOatsMobile for more Test Drives than he can probably remember, is now a Married Man – and maybe a Dad-to-Be as well, with brand-new wifey Kuroki Meisa rumored to be a couple of months impregnito (lol). Shocker, I know. (While Meisa’s condition isn’t official (yet), her abrupt cancelation of all media and event appearances a few days before the Feb. 15 launch of her new album has kept the grapevine buzzing and those raised eyebrows, well, raised.)

It became official at their Sept. 15th concert: over the past nineteen years since their 1991 debut, the SMAP Boys II Men have entertained enough concertgoers to populate… Hungary!!! (10,013,628 inhabitants, according to the Jan. 2010 Eurocensus)

Should this interview go down in J-Pop infamy (and I’m sure it will be remembered for generations of fangirls to come), there’ll be none to blame but Jinny’s ROFLtastic (and cringe-worthy) hemming and hawing for a good chunk of the segment. Instead of answering the questions point-blank, he equivocates on the controversial semantics of his self-penned song; instead of bad-assing his way through the third degree with his usual bluntness, he chooses to be coy. You’re in Eemrricaa now, Jinny Boy, so it’s about time you manned up and learned to call a spade a spade – or rather, call spit a spit– if ya know what I mean, hyuk hyuk hyuk.

Once again, the Yuletide season is peeking around the corner. So what images does Christmas Day conjure for you? Carolers and church bells? Giant lanterns and Nativity scenes? Roasted chestnuts and spiced hot chocolate? Buying, recycling, unwrapping (and swapping!) of presents?

Let’s find out the Reason for the Season according to Akanishi Jin, newly minted L.A.-based solo artist. Here’s a viddy of Jinny sitting down for an interview on the UTB channel’s Music Talk segment where he elaborates on one of the songs he performed on his You and Jin tour, entitled – “Christmas Morning.” What he doesn’t talk about are Auto-Tune, Johnny Kitagawa, and his past life as a Japanese cheezucake — er, J-Pop Idol.

(The original uploader, Sujun2, took the video down on Aug. 27th as she had promised she would. So I’m embedding the only other Youtube video I could find. Credit to akanerojoatardecer.)

SMAP: Break the Records (For You and By You!!!)<< (*ka-ching!!!* And yet another KaT-TUN reference!!! Gomen gomen gomen… now leave me alone, lol)

Yes yes yes, we’ve all heard the news (via Tokyograph or other sources), so SMAP’s latest album “We Are SMAP!” breezed up the charts three weeks ago to become the Japanese manband’s 5th consecutive #1 album — bringing their career haul to 11 no. 1 albums spread out over twenty years. (Overzealous music industry mavens like to drumbeat SMAP’s achievement as being only the third time in J-music history that a group has had a best-selling album in three different decades, although a few, like myself, believe that the next decade begins at 00:01 hours on Jan. 1, 2011, making the whole of 2010 still part of the Noughties.)

But that is to split hairs; nothing changes the fact that SMAP have been Japan’s biggest idol group since the early ’90s, and their latest studio album — with the Unicef-y kiddie art adorning the cover and the Engrish.com-worthy title that jauntily states the obvious (“We Are SMAP! Every day love tomorrow” << LULZWOT) — only proves that the wholesome, the nontoxic, the inspiring, the playful, the SMAP — these have not gone out of style in Jmusicland… at least, not yet.

So here’s a clip of SMAP performing their latest single “This Is Love” which was released last Aug. 4th. I took a short break from writing a couple of reviews and long-overdue posts, and from watching a couple of new dramas (in E.G. terminology, “new” = at least a season old, lol) in order to put these vid clips out here, though I hope against hope that they get to live a few days more before the Jimusho’s evil groundlings sniff out the Youtube links and hack ‘em to bits with their rusty old katanas, hatessss!!!! (Please Kamisama, give us more time… lololol)

Last July 25th, Johnny Kitagawa sent Akanishi Jin a message. — In a bottle, you say??? No!!! — In a — Johnny!!! Actually — No!!! — In a pair of Johnnies, to be exact! Tokyohive reports that during the July 25th MC portion of KaT-TUN’s World Big 2010 Tour (WTF World Big????? hahahahaha), the topic turned to TV dramas that members had co-starred in. And Kamenashi Kazuya, ever Johnny’s loyal hatchet man-thing, pointedly asked Taguchi Junnosuke if he had ever done a drama with another member before, to which Junno (aka The Member Least Likely to Act Like an Ass — Until Now) replied that no he had not, (conveniently) forgetting that he had actually done not one, but two dramas with newly minted ex-member Akanishi Jin. (Yukan Club in 2007 and Omae no Yukichi ga Naiteiru in 2001.)

Junno’s loaded denial sparked off a wave of indignation among Jin fans and prompted heated reactions that Kame and Junno’s snarky exchange was tantamount to “mistreatment” of the former KaT-TUN idol. (Snarky yes, but… mistreatment? LAWL riiiight. What is Jin, a 4-year-old child locked away under the stairs?) Both camps (Jin vs. KaT-TUN) have since exchanged accusations and sundry excuses, all swinging from the “keep blinking real hard until you get the logic behind them” headscratch-worthy variety, to the downright LOLWHATesque — like, Technically Jin isn’t part of the band no mo’, so Junno wasn’t obliged to mention him!!! Or — maybe Junno simply forgot!!! He forgot that he did those two dramas with Jin, amongst the — um, oodles of dramas he’s done it’s so hard keeping track of ‘em all!!!